Olga's Gallery

Ivan Shishkin

(1832-1898)

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The
works of this outstanding artist enjoy vast popularity in Russia; the best
of them have become the classics of Russian landscape painting. During
40 years of his artistic activity Ivan Shishkin produced hundreds of paintings,
thousands of studies and drawings and a large number of engravings. For
contemporaries, Shishkin’s personality embodied Russian nature itself;
they called him “forest tzar”, “old pine tree”, and “lonely oak”.
Ivan Ivanovich Shishkin was born into the family of a merchant. His father,
a self-made and broad-minded man, after long hesitations, supported his
son's desire to become an artist. In 1852-1856, Shishkin studied in the
Moscow School of Painting and Sculpture, in 1856-1860, he continued his
studies in St. Petersburg, in the Academy of Arts. He made rapid progress
and got all the awards the Academy offered. Having
received a Major Gold Medal for two pictures with the same name
View
of Valaam Island. Kukko. (1860) and an Academy grant for studies
abroad, Shishkin spent 3 years (1862-1865) in Germany, Switzerland, Czech,
France, Belgium and Holland. Gradually he got disappointed in his foreign
teachers and European authorities in landscape painting. Now he felt free
and independent and longed to return home, to Russia.
During his stay abroad Shishkin engaged in lithography and etching. His
numerous pen drawings caught the eye of the Dusseldorf public and critics
by their virtuoso hatching and filigree treatment of detail. In 1865, Shishkin
painted his View near Dusseldorf
for which he was awarded the title of Academician and which was shown at
the 1867 World Fair in Paris.
In 1865, he returned to Russia and settled in St. Petersburg, where he
joined the Itinerants’ Society of Traveling Exhibitions (Peredvizhniki).
One of his first masterpieces Noon in the
Neighbourhood of Moscow (1869) critics called “song of joy”.
He always preferred to draw daytime scenes, full of sunlight and life.
Pine
Forest in Viatka Province (1872), Rye
(1878), Path in a Forest (1880),
Oaks
(1887), Coniferous Forest. Sunny Day.
(1895). His scrupulous reproduction of nature stood in sharp contrast to
the academic canons of landscape painting. For his loving approach to detail
some critics called his works colored pictures, which lack of life. But
despite such attention to details Shishkin’s paintings do not fall apart,
but give full and finished impression.
Shichkin had a troubled private life, twice he fell in love and married
and twice his wives died. His sons also died. But never Shishkin allowed
his sorrows appear on his canvases. His last work is Mast-Tree
Grove (1898). He died in his studio at the easel with newly
begun canvas.
Among the Russian landscape painters Shishkin was the staunchest and most
consistent exponent of the materialistic aesthetics – to depict nature
in all its pure, unadorned beauty. His role in Russian art did not lose
its significance even in the years, which saw the appearance of splendid
landscapes by Isaac Levitan,
Valentin
Serov and Constantin Korovin.
Despite the fact that he espoused different aesthetic principles and advocated
a different artistic system, Shishkin enjoyed an indisputable authority
among young Russian painters of the late 19th century. The new generation
did not fail to acknowledge him as a thoughtful and masterful portrayer
of Russian nature.